Logbook entry: Phoenix to Bangalore - the LAX-Dubai leg: faces float before me, Stewardess Jennifer

When the life of someone you love and care deeply about is suddenly taken, you find it impossible to believe. You know its true, but even so you do not believe it. Then you go through a hard but necessary process. You gather with others who loved this person and together you mourn. You view the body; you attend the funeral and the burial, or the disposal of the ashes.

Finally, you not only know, you believe it.

When Soundarya followed the death of her husband Anil with her own, I did not get to go through that process. Despite my knowledge, I never came to believe that it actually happened. I knew it, but I didn't believe. There was a certain part of my mind that steadfastly held to the notion that, somehow, she would become whole and real and physical and would once again walk upon the same world as do I. I saw and experienced nothing that succeeded in fully dispelling this notion from my soul.

I come to India this time with three purposes. It is far too late for me ever to attend the funeral or observe the return of Soundarya's ash to the sacred waters into which she followed Anil, but something inside me needed to come back to this place where I first met her in 2007, then returned in 2009 with Melanie to attend her wedding to Anil. At the very least, I need to at least look upon those waters.

Then, maybe, I will not only know but believe.

The second purpose is to attend and document the formal Hindu wedding of Sujitha to Manoj. Regular readers know Sujitha, Soundarya's sister and Aunt to my three grandsons, whom she loves so much that at Christmas she sent the money that purchased the electric, HO scale, Thomas the Train, that has appeared on this and my original blog.

Sujitha especially loves little Jobe.

Over the past 16 months, despite the fact that half-a-globe curved away between us, Niece Suji and I have closely bonded and have been there for each other.

So I wanted to be in India now for her and Manu, when they, literally, tie the knot - part of Hindu ceremony.

The third purpose is to become just a bit more familar with and to better understand this complex and incomprehensible place called India. I never imagined I would have any kind of attachment or relationship with India at all, until August of 2007, when my niece Khena, second daughter of my sister Mary Ann, married Vivek, cousin to Soundarya, Sujitha and their brother Ganesh, here in Bangalore.

From the day of the wedding forth, they, and all their family in India, have become my family and I have felt a continual connection to them. So, after the wedding of Manoj and Sujitha, scheduled to take place in Pune on the 13th, I will go touring with Vivek's parents, Murthy and Vasanthi, who never give me a chance to get hungry. If she were to move to Anchorage and open a South Indian restaurant, I believe Vasanthi would be an overnight hit and could grow rich, because that is the kind of cook she is: Superb!

So we are going to roam about Western India for a week, where we will have to substitute restaurant cooking for her cooking. I don't think it will be quite as good, but I still believe it will be excellent. And I know that Vasanthi will still make certain that I never get hungry - no, not even for one minute. 

And yet, full though I always am when I am with them, when the food is placed before me, I say, it is too much, but then I eat and cannot stop myself from eating even more.

This is the route the Emirates Airlines jet followed in the 15 hours plus that it took to fly me on the Los Angeles to Dubai leg of the three leg trip from Phoenix to Bangalore. Throughout every minute of the flight, whether I was wide awake, hardly able to keep my eyes open, suspended between wake and sleep or actually into a dream, I continually saw the face of Soundarya and also that of Anil passing before me; sometimes separately, sometimes together.

Continually. Soundarya - her vision face so filled with the same eager zeal for life, tinged with deep hurt, that it expressed when it had existed in flesh. Anil - his vision face appeared somehow sweet, innocent. In life, he had a handsome, rugged, look about him and he could sometimes lose his temper, but there was something sweet and innocent about him.

All three legs of the flight would add up to over 25 hours - then add to that the three hour drive from LeeAnn's home in Hon Dah, nearly three hours on the ground in Phoenix and a good three hours from the time I landed in Bangalore until my head hit the pillow at Murthy and Vasanthi's house and it was a pretty long day.

And now that day is now more than three days past. For reasons that would take too much time to explain, I have not been able to blog until now. I thought about just skipping any account of the flight altogether and instead to jump right into the present, but, this is the "Logbook" and the whole idea is that when I travel, I make a Logbook entry.

So this is it.

This is Jennifer of Ghana, stewardess. We spoke for a few minutes when we wound up standing beside each other as we waited for the doors to open so that we passengers could debark in Dubai. She has a friend in Ghana who lived for a time in Alaska.

I did not ask her where, because I have discovered that sometimes when you meet people far from Alaska, they do not know the answers to this kind of question. Alaska is Alaska, and sometimes, when you travel in this part of the world, people have only the vaguest idea of Alaska, if they have any idea at all.

I wondered how a woman from Ghana got the name Jennifer, but I didn't ask.